Confession: I’ve been called a GTD Disciple. That is, I’ve adopted the David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology to help me be more productive with less stress. Allen taught me how to close loops, keep track of multiple projects, and how to write things down rather than trying to remember them. In the words of Field Notes Brand, “I’m not writing it down to remember it later; I’m writing it down to remember it now.” Allen taught me that trying to keep everything in mind hurts both creativity and productivity. He writes in Getting Things Done,
“For example, in the past few minutes, has your mind wandered off into some area that doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re reading here? Probably. And most likely where your mind went was to some open loop, some incomplete situation that you have an investment in. That situation merely reared up out of the RAM part of your brain and yelled at you internally. And what did you do about it? Unless you wrote it down and put it in a trust collection tool that you know you’ll review appropriately something soon, more than likely you worried, or at least reinforced some unresolved tension, about it. Not the most effective behavior: no progress was made, and stress increased.”[1]
I eventually merged Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal method with GTD into a tool that I call Mission Control (a GTD-modified template adopting Carroll’s symbols in Leuchtturm1917 journals). As with any tool or methodology, mine is only as effective as its use, which is to say, on and off but better than nothing. I can testify that when I’m “on,” I less often wake in the middle of the night with my thoughts racing and my brain yelling at me, “WHY ARE YOU ASLEEP??”